http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg9uVRfnxGI

my dear dee.

A clown wedding-The marriage of Jonah Logan of the Daredevil Opera Company and Sabrina from Circus Orange
-a long but rather incomplete description of events.

I always wondered what would happen if one of my circus friends got married...

We get there at night after meeting at the airport, I, coming from visiting my lovely parents in the rolling green lush of Athens, Ohio and the rest of The New York crew popping up from the city. We are all Bindlestiff alumni aside from Amy Conan, Magic Brian's girl friend, who is rather upset because Delta sent her and Brian's bags with their wedding clothes to Vermont. Una the aerialist is here and her man, accordion rock vocalist god, Corn Mo (who I commandeered into being the next Bindlestiff musician one night in a giant Dallas frat bar, when he opened for us). We are all old friends and it's wonderful when these circus people meet each other. Our immediate reaction is to laugh. I love that about the circus folks, they really get a kick out of each other, we are contantly grinning at each other and joking. We love being around each other.

We arrive at the Vision and Design compound which is the Logan family's business that includes fire works and a full fabrication shop. Its about 2 hours outside of Toronto in the middle of no-where. I'm looking forward to seeing them all again, they are really great people .This is where we built and rehearsed all the Daredevil Opera Company shows. It's dark when we get there. There is a new 150 foot tower they've built above the tree line to catch the internet right next to the clowndominium I can't wait to climb it.

We hear a vehicle tearing through the dark path in the woods and know it's Jonah coming to get us. We stand in a line goofily, arms around each other to great him and he pulls up in a fantastic Thai taxi cart, bedecked with curved rails and colored lights. We hop on and we are off through the trees on a twisting path lined with candles, past the "dangerous turtle pond" (Jonah has a fear of fish and other swimming creatures...parents watch what you name your kids) and into the clearing of a former asparagus field. It's beautiful, the tent rises, lined with lights and I feel like I'm Harry Potter arriving to school for the first time. It's magic.

It's a small beautiful circus tent, red and yellow stripped with twin peaks. Inside the ten, hand made wooden benches and coctail tables with single logs for supports-bark in-tack, a little stage and the crew putting the final touches on everything. A moon pinata hangs from the ceiling with 50-60 strings hanging off to it, each attached into the body. Becks from The Circus Orange doesn't recognize me. The last time she and Tom Comet saw me was years ago when we all did Rocket Johnny and Roxxane Rolls Death Stunt Show in Australia. I had very little hair and it was died Orange!. (I remember that Jonah and Tom trying to find the right strength pyro-charge in order to blow up a Watermelon. They didn't want it totally vaporize the Watermelon but also it could not throw chunks. It was for William Tell like bit where a character uses the Assblaster 3 to shoot a watermellon off another clowns head.) In the tent there is a running tap of good beer and Jonah pulls out a bottle of Canadian Rye whiskey, which tastes very young compared to the petey scottish stuff I like. It is still delightful. We don't get to meet Sasha, who owns the tent. Apparenlty he is 60 years old with the body of a very fit 28 year old, is a great character and has a 40 year old wife who is a belly dancer with a PHD.

The next day I get to see my Daredevil composing/sound design partner Paul Weir, it's been quite awhile and since then he went back to school and became an EMT. We sit in a trailer with a table full of musical toys and practice a tribute to the couple that I had been devising. We click right together, experimenting and suggesting and commenting. They used to call us the "Odd Couple" when we where building the score for Anti-Gravity's Crash Test Dummies for the New Victory Theater. We would work right next to each other, Paul's computer station neat and immaculate next to my mess of chords, drum machine and guitar pedals. "Can I have my headphones?" he once asked and I had to unbind them slowly from the industrial spaghetti.

The next morning Amy and Magic stop by the thrift store for some new clothes, Brian gets a great cowboy shirt and Amy gets a dress that would look perfect at a Junior Prom in the 80s.. It is supposed to rain all weekend but it doesn't, in fact the day of the wedding, the sun even comes out a bit a couple of times. The wedding starts with an industrial bubble machine spewing bubbles over the field, the caterers canopy, the 4 BBQ pits and the smoker for cooking all kinds of meats, the vats for cooking hot dogs, corn dogs and sweet potatoe chips, the cotton candy machine the carmel corn, the fire pit and all the little seating areas they've set up in the field and of course the circus tent which has flags flying at each peak. There will be amazing food and so much of it. The entire night will be endless amounts of food. To start off we have the best corn dogs of our lives, truely amazing bison sliders (meat raised locally) with pickelled local relish, peppers andtomatoe/cherry catsup and then and then...the hordurves start making there rounds, giant bbqs shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, thai-spring rolls, slices of BBQ duck, bruschetta. I allmost back into the hot oil of for the sweet potatoe chips (idiot), oh yes, there are also lamb chops and the food has barely gotten started.

After a long time of eating and socializing. I hear that the wedding party is soon going to make an appearence but no-one planned a wedding march! Fish who is the musician who took over for me when the Death stunt show went to the Sydney Opera House (and works allot with Circus Orange), says he'll play something and ends up playing the pre-show music that I wrote for the show (which was originally Bindlestiff music) mixed with his own pre-show melody. Finally the Cajun band comes through the path in the woods and plants themselves for a few songs at the entrance of the tent. They go in a we follow. Everyone takes a seat. Three circular circus platforms are in the center ring. Finally two young boys come into the tent pulling wagons with little girls throwing flowers, the groom's men in their white trimmed black jackets, the bride's maids in their floor length dresses and the groom looking ridiculously handsome. ( I once wrote a song for him in the Bindlestiff Cirkus. "he's pretty and sweet and he smells like meat, the most handsomest man in the world. from the tip of his nose to the corns on his feet, the most handsomest man in the world, all the ladies bend over, when he walks by and stick their rumps in the air, but he ignores them, even though they cry, when your this handsome, you just dont care!..." ) And she is just beautiful, looking like a young Joni Mitchell in many ways. Sabrina has such a bright energy you can tell she is lovely lovely soul.

The ceremony. I wont do it justice here, I wish I could. The master of ceremonies is Neil smart looking fellow with grey hai. He talks a bit then introduces us the person...er creature who will be performing the actually ceremony, who is female buffoon cat clown by the name of FOO that speaks in her own language. Neil then translates her babble to the audience. I don't know, it at the time but they are partners. It's a great clown/straight man relationship. Foo standing on one platform Jonah and Sabrina standing on the other two platforms, her babbling the ceromoney with ALLOT of gusto, the audience delighted and laughing. Neil, then translating what comes out into rather traditional vows. FOO loosing it a couple of times, babbling implications of Jonah's future of drinking and laziness and Sabrina's naggin and Neil skipping that part. It's very funny. The rings are brought out by one of thes boy. Jonah puts on her ring and and says "I love you because..(says something very sweet) and FOO rants/babbles at them from the stage and then storms out..then everyone with drinks and then the bride and groom are prounounced in from of family and community, man and wife, they kiss and BOOOOOMM!!! of course, confetti rains down on them and everyone while they kiss. The community then all took a string from the moon and we all pulled it apart, raining candy everywhere.

Then dinner starts, station after stations serving, smoked ribs, brisquet, lettuce rapped burritoes, curry, cheeses, wonderful toppings and sides, pulled pork, pies and I can't remember what else...and just in case thats not enough jars of candy and lots of beer and whiskey. Speaches are made for the couple, Sabrina's dear friend Lindey Goodtimes is the master of ceremonies, Jonah's old room mate in college, who is now a business man, leads the grooms men in a speech, Paul Weir and I play a love song for the couple on multiple canister music boxes, whistling and bells and there are trapeze acts.

There is a VERY funny dance/skit about the love story of Jonah and Sabrina and how they met on Circus Orange shows from the Circus Orange crew. Jonah's sister Tanya, has a little kid, named Sadie, who sings a really steller version "Home on the Range". (She's just like her granny everyone says, she used to sing all the time). Jonah's father who is a man of few words shocks Jonah by making the longest speach Jonah has ever heard. Later onstage Jonah is obvioulsy a bit stunned " I've never heard my father say so many words at one time in his life!" Jonah expresses that he is not sure what his 90 year old grandma thought of the whole thing and is not sure if she is still even there. She is actually is and in fact she stays till midnight. Una and I spend some time with her, she is a really lovely soul. Her cane has the handle of a saw and she later sits in a borrowed mens suit jacket and a hat lent to her for the cold. Becks makes sure she knows when somethings about to happen so she'll be there to see it.

Una makes a beautiful speech about meeting Jonah and how when she was questioning if she needed dance training or schooling of some sort to make her act really pop, he told her "you have it, you are already there". She talks in her forward pushing wonderful way about how much she wishes ma and pa Bindle, Keith and Steph could be there and elequenly gives love from the New York crew. We have tears in our eyes. Jonah does also. The Cajun band plays, the rock band, Goodtimes, plays, led by a great singer who is Lindsey's husband, Sabrina's I-pod pushes old school hip hop and micheal jacksons thriller into the tent. We dance and dance. Late night there is more food, poutine (an amazing dish of gravy, fries and cheese curd), battered fish..and god I don't remember what else. we dance more.

There is a giant picture frame where you step on a lever and it takes your photo. Una plays with it all night slowing doing a strip tease, Magic and I mug for the camera as potentially gay lovers, Una and I break the bottom of the frame by trying to put our legs over it all the while taking photos of us and the camera crew trying to fix it. sillyness and more sillyiness. lots of dancing, the Orange crew doing choreographed routines from their shows on the dance floor ( I didn't realize this, I thought they where just amazingly in-sinc with each other and making it all up)
There so many lovely people at this event and I don't meet even half of them.

At then end of the Circus Orange skit, which again, was just funny and wonderful, they start a parade which leads us all outside into the field. Earlier that night while magic brain and New York Crew where drinking and laughing, Magic looks up says. "We are so lucky..we are so lucky...not because of what we do, we chose to live the lives we lead but because of the people we get to be with this, because of this..." he sweeps his hand around the tent. "We are so lucky."

In the field the fireworks begin. Eric Cardinal designed it. I can honestly say I've never been so moved by a fire works display or that I've ever actually been moved at all by a fireworks display aside from the love of the boom. BOOM! The display starts with small bursts in the air. Two rockets go at slight angles from each other with a soft rocket exploding in between, it happens several times. Wow. We get it. we feel it. rapid fire rockets shoot, bang, bang,bang, bang, bang bang bang, larger bursts higher and higher and finally a huge burst, soft with multi-colored drops falling. love my friends, it's love. true love. There is the love of the couple, love of the friends, love of the family and the love of life and yes I know I am one one of the luckiest peole who ever lived, all of us in that field are. All good wishes and long love to you Jonah and Sabrina you are two rockets burning bright exploding again and again.

...morning...breakfast was pretty amazing also, with wild blueberries from Quebec, homemade yogurt, potatoes, eggs and locally made sweet garlic sausages. Jonah is walking leaning at bit on a cane. It has a magnet embedded in the handle and he's trying to steal things out of my pocket and jewlery off women's necks. Sabrina is dressed in a smart lithe cowgirl outfit. Magic Brian is hung over and can't find exedrine but I ask the moms sitting in the circle, I know they'll have it and they do. Corn Moe is happily munching away. After taking picture after picture, (Una is a great one armed camera person) we get one more photo with Paul Wier and Jonah. I did pace myself well with the food that night. Actually the whole crew is a bit dissapointed that I don't eat quite the mass quantities of food I used to but my lust of good sausage is intact. Those sweet sausages are the best sausages I've ever eaten in my life. I wrote this at the house of Tom Comet and Becks who run Circus Orange, then housed me and fed my an amazing omlet and good coffee. Tomorrow I have a Sxip's Hour of Charm at Joe's Pub and then the band is off to Megan Wyler's wedding in Italy...Itally....yum yum. I can't wait.

The Luminescent Orchestrii is touring in Vermont

"You can stay at our place after the gig but we got some pig stuff to do in the morning" Amos tells us. What he doesn't tell us till we get there is that "pig stuff" is shooting two porkers in the head early in the morning. BANG BANG, then taking the shovel tractor, lifting them up by chains, dipping them in water heated in an oil drum with a fire underneath so it's easy to scrape off the skin, then they are cut them up into food. The removal of the internal organs is swift and efficient. The whole system of the animal comes out as one intact engine. The friends come over, it's a family event.

The night before I sit with Amos and drink hard cider and moonshine. Wonderful. His wife has made amazing saurkraut. Which we eat with delicious homemade bread and butter. We also eat homemade miso, also wonderful, not very salty and unblended so there is still visible rice in it. (you add "inoculated" rice to beans to make it) I realize that what you get in the stores is not saurkraut. Saurkraut is amazing because it is a fermented food. It is alive when you eat it. Like yogurt. The stuff in the store is dead, boiled, pickled with vinegar and chemicals and dead. Just like in France I come face to face with the fact that what we are offered to eat in this country is a tragedy.

"He lives in a mansion" Sarah tells me.

A mansion? When we pull up in the dark after the gig, I see a little low farm house, nestled in the hills of Vermont. It doesn't look very large. Only once inside and being toured around the cold house do I realize it is indeed very large. It is long and has little apartment areas. It was a boarding house in in the 30's, 40's and 50's for young men who needed to learn to chop wood, garden and work along with learning latin and the classics. It was the feeling of Amos' grandfather that city boys where getting to soft and needed to work the land along with their learning. Now two people live there Amos and his pregnant wife Lana. Ths house sprawls and stretches, part of it was built in the 1700s. It is beautiful, there is a waterfall right near the house. It falls down a slanted cliff face, pooling a bowl halfway down and then pooling again at the bottom. It seems magic and unreal and all two real. The house is filled with ancient books, bibles, latin readers, classics and french picture magazines.This will be an incredible place for a child to grow into.

Amos used to the be the guitarist for the mad old time fiddle player John Specker. Who somehow puts sex drugs and hip wiggling into old time fiddle playing.
http://www.funkyside.com/johnspecker

Sxip's Hour of Charm at Joe's Pub!

Dear folks, I am back from an incredible 10 week tour of the UK, France and
Austria with the Lumienscent Orchestrii. I don't have time to even take a
breath. Sxip's Hour of Charm will be running in Boston, also Luminescent
will be doing an amazing show with 17 Hippies, dumb name but amazing
Balkanalian band from Germany on Sept 26th. More info on that later.

BUT I've put together another night of my favorite NYC art cabaret people
at Joe's Pub, including Dayna Kurtz who is like a female Leonaord Cohen and
Keith Nelson from The Bindlestiff Family Circus and one of my heros, Julie
Atland Muse and the incredible butoh contortionist Jonathan Nosan and Bora
Yoon, who may well be the next performance aritist-musical pop start like
Laurai Anderson. Of course there is me and the lovely Greg Walloch...damn,
read below for more. I promise another night of ridiculous amounts of spark
and flare.


JOE'S PUB
Monday,17 Sep 2007, 9:30
425 Lafayette
New York City, 11201

Cost: 17 in advance/20 at the door
212-967-7555 for tickets or...
http://www.joespub.com/caltool/index.cfm?fuseaction=emailfriend&performanceI
D=3210

Sxip Shirey is a real life circus and theater composer. Once every few
months he puts together a line-up of New York City artist he truly loves
and respects. The show will send you into fits. Sxip's Hour of Charm
returns with another incredible all star line up of the performers who make
New York the amazing city that it is. Including the incredible song-writing
and singing of Dayna Kurtz, a very deep songwriter with a powerful singing
style and deep visceral lyrics. A solo performance with wonderful Bora
Yoon, who has performed with DJ Spooky and was featured in the Wall Street
Journal recently for her rather beautiful cell phone composition. The
amazing contortion/butoh of Jonathan Nosan. Julie Atlas Muse, a incredible
performer who turns burlesque and everything else right on it's head. The
very very very funny comedy duo Kurt and Kristin. The sword swallowing of
the charming Keith of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, the sexy, sweet,
raunchy story telling and comedy of Greg Walloch AND of course Sxip Shirey.
7 acts of fearless entertainment and art.

Amanda Palmer and A.R.T present

SXIP's HOUR of CHARM

Wonderful, Curious and Fantastic. Music, Comedy and Variety hosted by real-life circus composer Sxip Shirey.

Join Sxip Shirey as he presents 3 unique weekends of performance. Featured acts change every weekend. See all three shows!

Weekends, Sept. 14-30 (Friday and Sunday at 8pm, Saturday at 7pm & 10pm)
at the Zero Arrow Theater
$25 tickets available now at
www.amrep.org (617) 547-8300

Week One:
Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls
Vocal loop wizard Reggie Watts
Cyr Wheel acrobat Jonas Woolverton
Gypsy punk accordionist Jason Webley
The aerial artistry of Una Mimnagh
Sxip and the incredible Obnoxiophone

Week Two:
The enticing music of Erin McKeown
The dark and delicious Beat Circus
Cirque de Soleil's Eric Davis as "The Red Bastard"
Rock accordion powerhouse Corn Mo
Una Mimnagh and the beautiful Corde Lisse
Sxip and the haunting Industrial Flute

Week Three:
The rich music of Emily Grogan
The deep original songs of Dayna Kurtz
Bronx rope-spinning cowboy AJ Silver
Raunchy, sweet, sexy comedy of Greg Walloch
Una Mimnagh and the rare and unusual Ceiling Walk
Sxip and his Mutant Harmonicas

CASH BAR
$25 tickets available now at
www.amrep.org (617) 547-8300

Starts October 27: Donnie Darko, live! Present this card at the A.R.T. box office for $25 tickets to the ART's production of Donnie Darko. Limit two tickets per card.

The Luminescent Orchestrii is playing a wonderful festival in a small town in France called Hastings. The French accordion player and I are having lunch. I got the steak instead of the duck hearts. "Why would you have steak when you could have duck hearts??!!" he asks me. This is a question I am not sure how to answer. He gives me half of his duck hearts. They are delicious.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HhsV7wi7GBk

5 performances in three days. Last weekend was the latest installment of Sxip's Hour of Charm at Joe's Pub with many stand out performances and the thrilling contortion butoh of Johnathan Nosan. Who pretty much freaked the whole audience out by completely bending his body into unreal shapes all the while keeping himself from bursting into laughter or tears. You couldn't tell and the effect was very exhilarating and disturbing.

But this last weekend I find myself with the Luminescent Orchestrii one hour north of NYC, with the traffic it took two hours, sweating in the heat of a grade school auditorium. 30 children are dressed as mermaids, sea monsters and fisherman doing a play about a mermaid and her human husband, their multitude of children, a lost tail, and here we are playing the music, making sound effects and ending the whole event with "Neptune's Daughter" one of our current "hits" and the reason partially we got the gig. That was a rehearsal on Friday and two shows on Sunday. On Saturday I trudged up to 28th street and 6th to watch the rehearsal of of a modern dance piece by Heidi Latsky featuring a Lawrence Carter-Long who is disabled and walks with difficulty but runs easier than we walks. The piece is tricky because you don't want it to be overly sentimental, it need to convey the strength and individual nature of the performer and not "Oh look at the crippled guy". It's been interesting and in order to ready myself Heidi introduced me to a piece of music I now love Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic. Wonderful, smart, deep and wonderful. Then I am at NYC's last regular and expansive underground party RUBULAD. The place has never looked better, art hangs everywhere, hanging from the ceilings like origami vines...actually some of it may have been origami vines. Ververitsi a new Balkan brass band plays and they are just lovely. Then Adam Matta and I hit the stage and proceed to do the best dance set of my life. For those of you who don't know, Adam Matta is an incredible human beat box that I love playing with. We did a deep house number with me playing double harmonicas through bull horns and Adam just laid it down hard. People loved it..and THEN after wandering about the party for a bit. WHY ARE WE BUILDING SUCH A BIG SHIP? hit the stage. my god I love this band. From New Orleans. Accordion, a ton of horns, stand up bass and back up singers, great song writing. orchestral, punk and New Orleans all at the same time. fun fun fun. good good good good. find these folks on myspace. Go find them playing you will be so happy. I also performed twice in a puppet show the Saint Annes Warehouse with my friend and one of my favorite puppeteers Erin Orr working on a puppet show that she and Rima Fand, friend and band member have been working on. The show is based on the poetry of Spanish poet Lorca, which Rima is rather obsessed with. The show is wonderful, the music is divine, really. I am making the sound effects, when Don Cristaballs heart gets shoved back into his chest I make a sound that sounds like bone being drilled by a bit with an actual drill grinding into a plastic bottle. We all go to eat afterwards at Superfine under the bridge. So that is NYC in a weekend. 5 performances (two at the school, two at saint annes, one at rubulad) and two rehearsals.